Camel's Nose
by Random One-Shot
Summary: It is said that if you let a camel's nose into your tent, the rest of it will soon follow. Tatsuki has never had a camel invade her personal space, but she's pretty sure she'd prefer the camel to this blue-haired freak.  GrimmxTatsu. Seriously. DotNO seql
1. Chapter 1

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_I don't own __Bleach__. If I did, I'd be paying Kubo to draw faster._

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Title: Camel's Nose

**__****Rating: **_T, for teen._

**_Summary: _**_It's said that if you let a camel shove its nose into your tent, the rest of it will soon follow. Tatsuki has never had a camel invade her personal space, but she's pretty sure she'd prefer the camel to this blue haired freak._

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His tooth was gone.

To be precise, his left maxillary second premolar was gone and Grimmjaw was not sure what bothered him more: the fact that a scrawny little girl had actually _damaged him_ or the fact that he seemed to have a thorough knowledge of dental anatomy despite never picking up a book on the subject. The most logical explanation for this was that he had been a dentist in his human life and that was just effing embarrassing.

("Hey, Grimmjaw! I was wondering if you remembered anything before being a hollow?"

"Yeah, I fixed teeth.")

Shit, that couldn't be right. It just _couldn't_.

The urge to kill something was rising with each flick of his tongue. It kept ghosting over the new gap between his molars and every time it did, he kept remembering how it had happened. Ordinarily, getting bloody wasn't something Grimmjaw had a problem with. However badass he was (and he totally _was_), a fight was still a fight – shit happened on both sides. What pissed him off was that he hadn't lost his tooth in a fight. He'd lost it to a sucker punch he should have seen coming a mile off from a girl who barely came up to his chest and however terrible knowing you'd been a pansy little dentist before becoming an Espada was, losing a tooth to a teenage human who didn't have enough power in her to charge a battery after you'd already become an Espada was _worse_.

So what if no one else knew about it? _Grimmjaw_ knew about it and that was what mattered. He'd gotten gore and corpses up to his elbows reaching his rank and things like getting punched by a five foot tall she-bitch _did not happen to him. _

Except that it _had_ happened, which made Grimmjaw want to kill something and which was why at 10:37 a.m., one week after Arisawa Tatsuki had made him eat dirt, Grimmjaw aimed a _cero_ blast at Karakura High School and let it go with a jolly smile on his face.

* * *

There was a lot of screaming and a lot of explosions. Mustn't forget the explosions.

Tatsuki pressed herself up against the wall and waited for a space to appear in the flow of panicking high school students. She was part of the Disciplinary Committee and technically was supposed to be directing the students to the exits, but Tatsuki had a feeling that all of her schoolmates knew where the exits were. Looking through the window showed her a literal flood of teenagers swarming across the front yard. That just left her looking out for stragglers or, worse, people who got knocked down and trampled. Then she had to swoop in from her spot on the sidelines, yank them to their feet and get them moving with the flow again.

And where the hell was Orihime?

She had disappeared in the confusion, alongside Ishida, Ichigo, Rukia and Sado. The majority of Tatsuki wanted to go find her, but the minority (which happened to be most of her common sense) said that the odds of finding one girl in this stampede were slim to none. That weird… feeling, or radar, or whatever it was that she had always used in the past to find Orihime was unreliable at the moment. Every time the ground shook with another blast, it was like someone whistled inside her head and all she could feel was raw power driving itself into her skull.

Growling at the whole damn situation, Tatsuki wondered if it would really be so bad to just take her chances with charging into the crowd and forcing her way through. She was short, but she'd taken hard knocks before. And if she stayed close to the walls, out of the way of the bulk of the flood, maybe -

There was a sudden surge behind her.

Tatsuki didn't know what the energy was. Over the past few weeks, as she slowly began feeling new things and seeing stuff she would have - _should_ have - written off as daydreams or her imagination, if it weren't for the way everyone else started acting when she pressed them about it, she realized that she wasn't having her senses _sharpened_ so much as _expanded_ and even added to. There was something new in her body now, something that let her feel a monster even before she heard it give that horrible wailing shriek from somewhere in Karakura.

That sense was telling her to move the fuck away from the wall.

Tatsuki jumped, surging into the writhing student body of Karakura High School, forcing her way to a classroom across the hall, where there would be cover from what was coming.

"Get out of the way!" Tatsuki screamed.

_'Oh God, they can't see it, can't __feel it coming__!'_

"Get _down! Get -"_

The wall exploded.

Plaster, steel, wood, glass and dust filled the hallway. Tatsuki blinked and realized she was on the floor. She had fallen down… no, she had been knocked down. Her ears were ringing. There was something pressing down on top of her. It wasn't heavy enough to hurt, but it was pinning her. Tatsuki grit her teeth and _pushed_. The weight was limp and reluctant to move, but as she got up on her hands and knees, it rolled off and Tatsuki saw the unmoving form of a girl she knew to belong to a classroom next to her own.

"Damn," Tatsuki hissed. "_Damn."_

"What? You think _that_ was impressive?"

Tatsuki froze. That voice was...

The karate practitioner rolled over and sat on her butt, staring up at the tall man - _not a man __not a _- who stared down at her, a look of bored arrogance on his face. He had blue hair that stood up in a wave on his skull and blue tattoes lining his eyes. An open white jacket and a bare chest, with a sword hanging at his hip. It didn't look like a fake either. His eyes were so blue that they almost glowed. There was something attached to his cheek, just where his jaw bone would be - _it grew out of his skin what is he what _- if you peeled away the skin.

But what really got her attention, apart from the fact that he was floating a few inches above the body riddled floor, was the _huge fucking hole in his god damned chest_.

The man -_ thing _- smiled and Tatsuki felt very small and weak.

"Bitch, you ain' seen nuthin' yet."

Coming from anyone (anything) else, Tatsuki probably would have laughed, but this guy….

Just being _around him_ hurt.

The air itself was pressing down on her skin. Every cut and scrape from the fall seemed to intensify. Breathing was hard, nearly impossible. Worst of all, a sudden paralysis gripped her body and it felt like she was sitting in a vat of concrete.

Grimmjaw saw all of this and smiled even wider.

"A lil' _cero_ blast did this. You want to see something _really_ cool?"

Tatsuki somehow didn't think he was actually giving her a choice.

The feeling was proven correct when the man with bizarre blue hair lifted his right hand and pointed it at her.

Grimmjaw had not been lying – by his standards, what he had aimed at Karakura High School _was_ a little blast. It had only left behind a crater ten feet deep and twice as wide, not to mention that all of the students nearby were still breathing. By Grimmjaw standards that was being nice, although he hadn't done it out of any pity for the mindless meat bags wandering down below him. Being Grimmjaw, he didn't have pity.

No, it was more out of a twisted sense of honor that Grimmjaw had withheld his full power. However much of an insect the girl was, she had nonetheless managed to knock him down for moment. Being one of the rare few who had done so and walked away from it, she deserved to look him in the face while he reduced her entire being down to the last atom and then obliterated her spirit for good measure, because, seriously, there was no fucking way he was letting her tell _anyone_, alive or dead, why he had felt the urge to kill her.

"Don't feel bad," Grimmjaw said quietly, enjoying the way her eyes widened and her breathing hitched. She was trying to move, he knew she was, but the pressure of his unrestrained power kept her trapped like a fly on sticky paper.

"It's just survival of the fittest out here, shorty," Grimmjaw drawled, feeling the _cero_ in his hand reach its max. "And you ain't got the –"

This was when Kurosaki _motherfucking_ Ichigo blindsided him, business end of Zangetsu first.

Although his skin kept the worst of the blade from reaching anything important, the force of the attack knocked Grimmjaw off kilter and he released the blast into the ceiling, instead of into Tatsuki's face. There was not much time to curse the sudden change in plans – although Grimmjaw couldn't help thinking _Two! Fucking! Seconds! And I would have been done, Kurosaki, you ill-timed __shit_ – because Kurosaki was coming closer with another strike ready and, while smacking the fuck out of the brat never seemed to get old, he had three other people backing him up. Grimmjaw was insane, almost certainly, but he wasn't dumb.

Reality peeled around him like an old onion skin and the Espada slipped away to Hueco Mundo three inches ahead of Zangetsu.

Oh well. It wasn't like the girl was going anywhere and although having Kurosaki and the idiots around him hovering near the girl would probably make things more difficult (the reason he had tried ambushing her at that disgusting area called an educational facility, _blargh_), Grimmjaw had found that lately 'difficult' was almost always linked to 'interesting'.

Not hard, really, as anything beat out listening to another one of Aizen's speeches. They seemed tailor made to cure insomnia and that wasn't good because the last guy to be caught sleeping in the briefings had lost an eye. Aizen had just smiled and revealed a slightly chipped lower-left cuspid in need of a….

…God. Damn. It.

The first seven hollows Grimmjaw found in the desert were ripped to bloody shreds and after that, every living thing within a thousand miles ran from him before he got so much as a glimpse of them.

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Bet you all thought this was on the back burner forever, huh? I made a promise to not post any more stories until I'd finished what I was working on. Then I realized _I wasn't working on anything__. I've spent the last few weeks blasting through my videogame collection instead of doing anything even slightly productive. So, hey, screw it. Take life as it comes, right? I'll do what I can, when I can. No more stressing._

_Things I Should Have Been Doing _

_Job hunting_

_Dishes_

_Playing with the dog_

_Emptying the cat's litter box_

_Study biology/chemistry/anything_

_Work on stories I have already posted_

_Work on my drawing skills, which are near to nonexistence_

_End world hunger_

_Vacuum_

_Videogames I Beat Instead _

_Final Fantasy X_

_Final Fantasy IX_

_Metal Gear 2_

_Dragon Age: Origins_

_Shadow Hearts_

_Shadow Hearts: Covenant_

_Legaia 2_

_Prince of Persia 2008_

_Jericho _

_Final Fantasy Dissidia_

_Tomb Raider Anniversary_

_Final Fantasy II_


	2. Chapter 2

_I don't own __Bleach__. If I did, I'd be paying Kubo to draw faster._

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_Title:__The Camel's Nose_

_Rating:__T, for teen._

_Summary:__It's said that if you let a camel shove its nose into your tent, the rest of it will soon follow. Tatsuki has never had a camel invade her personal space, but she's pretty sure she'd prefer the camel to this blue haired freak._

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The bus was kind of old and it smelled like wasabi, but it was blissfully free of orange hair and so she liked it. She needed a few minutes to think, to try to sort out what was happening (for all the good that had done over the last few weeks), and the ride to the gym was a perfect setting.

Tatsuki did not know when her friends began thinking she was a moron, but it was beginning to burn away her last bit of patience.

It had been bad enough a few months back, when it had all started with Rukia transferring in. She and Ichigo had clicked almost instantly, in a way that Tatsuki found hard to believe. Kurosaki Ichigo did not just start hanging around people like that. It had taken her a couple of months of beating his face in at karate practice before he had started asking his mother if Tatsuki could come over. Sado, Asano and Kojima had needed weeks of proximity and school projects that forced interaction before Ichigo really started to actively hang around them. He hadn't treated Orihime as anything more than a casual acquaintance until recently and Tatsuki would bet good money on him not even knowing who Ishida Uryuu was until about the same time.

Then Rukia had come to Karakura and, for whatever reason, Ichigo had thrown fifteen years of ingrained behavior out the window and gained a second shadow that liked rabbits. He began disappearing at odd hours, his homework suffered a decline in quality and he gave lies as to why this was. Had Tatsuki not spent copious amounts of time at school with Rukia herself, she might have been convinced that they were dating, but she had and the theory did not hold water. Ichigo had never shown any interest in dating and Rukia had seemed honestly, truly horrified when Orihime had brought up the subject of her and Ichigo as a couple. He could have been tutoring her. God knew her grades were bad enough, but why would he have lied about it?

Tatsuki had inside information on this from Yuzu and Karin, who still sometimes asked her to hang out with them. Ichigo, as the older brother, was still morally obligated to at least try to ensure his sisters ate well and were responsible with their time. As the pseudo big sister, Tatsuki was under no such obligation. On days when Yuzu and Karin could finagle some time away from family and education, Tatsuki took them to arcades, theatres (both movies and plays), the water park and any ice cream, candy or other sugar-riddled, unhealthy snack shop they wished. Even better, she never needed to pay one single penny because Yuzu, who was much more devious than anyone would believe, somehow always managed to convince her father that she needed more money for new clothes that she had outgrown and donated to charity.

'_Come to think of it, she has been pulling that one a lot more often lately. I wonder why?' _

Well, no matter. Yuzu's status as daddy's perfect princess and Karin's three fillings aside, the answer to her question still wasn't any closer.

Rukia had arrived and things had gotten weird. Then, they had gotten weirder. She had had that black out at Orihime's house, Chad was missing for a day, Ichigo went _totally fucking insane_ for about an hour and then popped back to normal like it had never happened, the whole Don Kanonji thing….

Every time things had become strange, at every incident where bizarre occurrences had happened, Ichigo and Rukia had been there. Then Rukia had….

Tatsuki frowned. Rukia had what? Gotten sick? Went on vacation? There was a period of… seven days? Ten days? There had been a long stretch of time where Rukia had not been around and, for some reason, she did not know where the other girl had gone to.

That was odd, even if Rukia was the new girl. Michiru, Ryo, Chizuru and Mahana had all shared their plans with her and she knew what the other girls in her class were doing just through the grapevine. Everyone had a plan for summer, always. It was practically a law. Why couldn't she remember Rukia's?

Then the weirdness had spread, touching Orihime, Sado and Ishida. They had disappeared soon after the summer festival. Tatsuki could have given the exact time and date, right down to the nanosecond, because she had woken up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night with the feeling of the entire universe sliding out of place. One phone call later and she had confirmed that Orihime was _not_ at her aunt's house. Another one and she knew that Ichigo was not at his house.

The sole reason she had not immediately called the police was that Kurosaki Isshin, a man she had come to see as the embarrassing uncle she never knew she wanted, had told her that A) Orihime was with Ichigo, and B) they would be back sooner or later. It was an explanation that left many things wanting, details not among the least of them, but Tatsuki had complied. 'Weird' had been the name of the game for the last few weeks and it appeared that things were not going to change.

So, she had hung around town and waited, slowly going insane from a combination of worry and that new, unpleasant 'ice down your spine' feeling that seemed to pop up whenever those loud roars did.

Time had passed and they did come back, along with Ishida and Sado, who she had not known were missing. Tatsuki watched, waited and quietly added them to her list. School started up again as usual and things seemed normal, with two huge, glaring deviations:

Deviation one – Ishida, Orihime, Sado and Ichigo were now extremely close friends. It was subtle and she probably wouldn't have noticed if she wasn't looking for it, but it was there. They rarely talked to each other, but if Orihime went to the cafeteria during lunch for a drink she had forgotten to pack herself, Tatsuki would see Sado pop up from nowhere to give her some change. If Ichigo needed a pencil sharpener, Uryuu flicked him one from across the room. If Uryuu needed sewing supplies, he went to Orihime because she had begun carrying a sewing kit with her for just that occasion. If Sado forgot to tape an episode of that Wild Kingdom whatever show he watched, Ichigo would mention that he had asked Yuzu to do it and Sado could pick it up whenever.

_Acquaintances_ did not do that. _Friends_ did.

It wasn't so odd for Sado and Ichigo, maybe, but Orihime had only been a classmate to them not long ago and Uryuu had been the ice prince of Karakura for _years_. Now suddenly he had not one, not two, but three people who he not only tolerated, but liked? Orihime had gotten over her peculiarly shyness with a startling speed and behaved as though she had been through a war tour with Ichigo; aware of whenever he entered a room and sometimes knowing where he would go before he did it.

It was _freaky_.

Which led to deviation two – she could nearly do the same.

It wasn't just for Ichigo. Uryuu, Sado, Orihime, Kojima, Asano, Ryo, Mahana, Michiru, Chizuru, Ochi-sensei; practically everyone in their class stood out to that new found sixth sense she had discovered. Ichigo, however, remained the worst of the lot. If he was in the room, it took focus to feel anyone else. She could point a straight line to him from the other end of town. Ichigo _blazed,_ like no one else she had ever encountered in the few weeks since it began. Whatever was happening to them had hit him worst of all.

And there was one other detail.

One tiny, almost insignificant thing that stood out.

The huge, gaudy golden badge _that no one else seemed to even notice._

And Ichigo knew that was weird.

"_Wait… Tatsuki, you can see this thing?"_

His exact words.

He _knew_. Whatever this was, whatever was happening, he knew something about it.

And she had kept quiet, for some stupid reason thinking that because he was her friend he would tell her about it soon enough. Except he _hadn't_ and things had gotten worse. She'd woken up in the middle of a field with her entire karate class in a coma and two… creatures staring at her in mild amazement that she was still moving. Orihime and Chad had shown up and she had _fainted in a fight_, which was sickening in and of itself. Then had come the night when the whole city shook like an earthquake was happening, except she could feel enough power to bring the sky down being thrown around her town. When she had gone outside, not entirely sure of why or what she could do, she had seen Kurosaki Ichigo, once again, in the thick of it all, glaring red murder at a man in white who stood on nothing one hundred feet above the street.

She had slipped away then, while Ichigo was busy talking with Renji. Tatsuki had gone home, made a cup of tea and spent the next few hours before school trying and failing to make sense of what her life had become.

Days passed in a senseless blur, until one day she felt a prickle on the back of her neck at karate practice. She had told her sensei that she would catch up and then she had waited.

The bastard didn't even try to hide.

He dropped out of the sky like a bird, landed lightly on the ground and started strolling toward her like he owned the school and all of Karakura too. It had taken all of two seconds to remember him as the guy Ichigo had thrown down with; the guy who had knocked Ichigo for miles and torn up the street like so much Styrofoam. He was probably an enemy and definitely dangerous.

So she had punched him.

Hard.

Ignoring the hole in his chest, the bone contraption on his face and the sword at his hip, Tatsuki surrendered to ten years of hard won martial skills and decked the prick with a textbook perfect right hook. Against her personal belief, he had actually gone down.

Then Ichigo showed up, once again following the weird (or maybe the weird followed him), and starting round two of his scrap with the blue-haired man. Tatsuki had only been able to follow them for a few seconds before the fight went out of range and she was left staring blankly into the sky.

She had had a bit of a meltdown after that.

The next three hours were spent breaking in the karate club's new recruits the hard way, with almost a dozen students leaving practice with bruises, scrapes, limps and a deep seated fear and respect of their senpai.

'_Screw respecting his secrets,'_ she had thought after that. Whatever it was had likely just tried to kill her and she needed answers.

There had been yelling after that; yelling and swearing and hitting, but it hadn't done any good. He had told her to mind her own business. That she was seeing things. That the problem had nothing to do with her. Etcetera, etcetera.

Except that it clearly did.

Because something had just smashed her school apart like a watermelon and tried to do the same to her.

And for the past four days, she had felt that thing, that not-man, hovering around her like a mosquito. He brushed against the edges of her sixth sense like nails on chalkboard. She was starting to think it was deliberate, like he was just screwing around with her. And, just once, she had woken up at night _knowing_ that someone was staring down at her through her bedroom window, but when she looked outside there had been no one.

It did not help matters that Ichigo was suddenly hanging around her again. No, it made them worse, because he was actively following her around like a guard dog, digging the most bullshit excuses out of nowhere to make sure that he reason to walk in the same direction that she did. He wasn't alone, either. Orihime had taken closeness to a new level and Tatsuki didn't like it, because she was all but positive Orihime was just trying to watch her back as well. Tatsuki had made the mistake of mentioning her late night fright over lunch and by school's end Orihime had 'suddenly remembered' that she forgot to pay her apartment's rent again this month and pretty please, Tatsuki-chan, can I stay over for a week or so?

It was utter garbage, but it was also Orihime and Tatsuki couldn't punch her. Every time Tatsuki brought up '_what the fuck is going on with you all lately_' Orihime had either waved it off, saying that it wasn't the big conspiracy Tatsuki thought it was, or she just flat out ignored the question.

Ichigo wasn't any better. Tatsuki _had_ punched him yesterday, but only managed to get in the one hit before he began dodging with an infuriating ease. She hadn't seen him since then, although she knew he was still following her around.

It. Was. Driving. Her. Mad.

Her sanity slipping, her patience slipped, her questions unanswered and her temper roaring like a bull in the arena, Tatsuki left Karakura High School at the end of the school day with every intention of riding the bus down to her favorite gym and demolishing any sandbags they had hooked up. She could not (deeply, truly _could not_) recall the last time she had felt this badly.

So naturally, seeing the man-thing with a hole in its chest and blue hair drop down from the sky to exclaim _found you!_ after she stepped off the bus did nothing to improve her mood.

Punching it in the face for the second time, however, rather did.

* * *

_Surprise! _

_I'm not dead._


End file.
